Nomads: A Magazine Made and Designed for Mobile
A team of magazine veterans are determined to revolutionize the magazine industry with Nomad Editions, a line of topic-friendly content, designed for mobile devices.
The company is led by founder Mark M. Edmiston, former president of Newsweek, along with a dozen of freelancers, hand-picked based on their areas of expertise. The team’s philosophy represents a timely, simple business model for digital media: readers pay a fair price for high quality, original and exclusive content to be delivered in a superior format to their mobile devices. Edmiston thought of the idea in the spring of 2009, before the iPad reached the market, but well after Kindle and other mobile devices began to steal readers away from print. The venture has been financed largely by friends, family and a crop of angel investors, and has raised $600,000 so far. Perhaps for this reason, Nomad Editions sees themselves as a family, a business created from the ground up, and the management team wants the content creators to be well rewarded for success. Proving their commitment to this tight-knit company culture, a percentage of Nomad’s revenue will be shared amongst contributors and editors alike.
The content contained within the electronic pages of the magazine will be based on individual interest, specified in advanced, within the areas of food, movies, surfing, and exceptional viral video. With designated quirky titles such as ‘Wave Lines: Your Brain on Surfing,’ Nomad Editions rant promises that each section will take approximately 30-minutes to read, seemingly designed for the average commuter. After a 30-day trial, Nomad Editions will be priced at a fair $24/year. To make the service even more everything friendly, Treesaver, a new company that divides content into pages by automatically adjusting the layout to the size of your screen, is sharing some technology muscle to Nomad. With Treesaver, readers can users use one web address to view the same content on their iPhone and/or desktop.
With similar digital magazines such as “Wired”, which sold an impressive 24,000 iPad apps in one day, it has already been proven that there is a huge market for an application like Nomad. “There is clear demand for good content on mobile devices as evidenced by the amazing growth of e-books and the terrific response to the magazine ‘apps’ launched on the iPad” Edmiston, Nomad’s CEO.
The service is set to go live October 15, 2010. I’ll give the 30-day free trial a try. Why not?
